Dr. Renee Lapp Norris

Renee Norris

Professor of Music

Email: norris@lvc.edu

Phone: 717-867-6283

Office Location: Hum 107C

Expertise:
Music History, Writing, Research

Research & Practice Areas:
American blackface minstrelsy specifically parodies of opera performed by minstrel troupes between 1840 and 1860.

  • Chair, Department of Music, LVC, 2014-2019.
  • Member at Large of the Board of Trustees of the Society for American Music, 2015-18.
  • Chair of Cambridge University Press Award (2015-17) and Housewright Dissertation Award (2012-13) committees for the Society for American Music.
  • Faculty Member of the Board of Trustees at Lebanon Valley College, 2010-2013.
  • Dissertation fellowship, Mary Savage Snouffer Scholarship Fund, College of Arts and Humanities, University of Maryland College Park (1999).

Forthcoming: Opera Parody Songs of Blackface Minstrels, 1844-1860, a scholarly edition to be published in Music of the United States of America, a 40-volume edited series sponsored by the American Musicological Society and published by A-R Editions

Review of The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy by Christopher J. Smith, and Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery by Katrina Dyonne Thompson. Journal of the Society for American Music 11.4 (Fall 2017): 502-507.

The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2013)
    biography: “Kavanaugh, Joseph,” “Kneass, Nelson,” and “Allen, William Francis”
    subject entry: “Minstrelsy” 

Opera and the Mainstreaming of Blackface Minstrelsy,” Journal of the Society for American Music 1.3 (August 2007): 341-365.

Review of Women Performing Music: The Emergence of American Women as Instrumentalists and Conductors by Beth Abelson Macleod. Society for American Music Bulletin 27.3 (Fall 2001): 9.

“Two Parodies of French Opera Performed by Blackface Minstrels,” The Sonneck Society for American Music Bulletin 25.1 (Spring 1999): 9-11.

“Introducing George Crumb’s Five Pieces for Piano to Advanced Students,” Clavier 37.8 (October 1998): 22-26.

Review of Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, edited by Sheila Whiteley. American Music 16.4 (Winter 1998): 479-483.

Presented at the annual meetings of the Society for American Music (2010, 2006, 2000, 1999) the American Musicological Society (1998), the American Studies Association Middle Atlantic region (2005), the Antietam Early American Banjo Gathering (2013), and elsewhere.

Black Opera (University of Maryland dissertation, 2001)

  • Music history courses for music majors
  • Music-oriented courses in Constellation LVC (writing and intercultural competency)
  • Integrative courses (ITG) in ConstellationLVC